I’m sure it was hard for Mrs. Dafoe, too, who probably had thirty other students to teach in that one room, at every elementary grade level. But she let Ellen run around and amuse herself while she was there. Unfortunately, when Mrs. Dafoe left, the new teacher wasn’t so fond of the idea, and so Ellen stopped going to school and spent her days back at the farm with my mother.
Ellen has the mental capacity of a four-year-old and needs help with everything, from feeding herself to getting dressed to combing her hair. She has to be supervised at all times, and we had some pretty scary close calls when she wasn’t. I’ll never forget the time when she got hold of an old inner tube and managed to push herself out into the river. The rest of us used to swim there all the time, bobbing around on inner tubes, no problem, but my mother had gathered them up and put them away in a shed, because she knew they could be a hazard for Ellen. Somehow, when she was around fourteen years old, Ellen got her hands on an old tire, which to her looked a lot like the inner tubes we all used. She went down to the river and got herself in, and the tire started filling with water, and began to sink. She was just a tiny little thing and when my mother spotted her, her head was just at the surface of the water. My mum managed to grab her and get her back to shore, but that was a big fright, and we knew we had to watch her all the more closely after that.
My mother was devoted to Ellen’s care and, in her old age, became afraid of what might happen to her when she passed away. “I hope she dies the second after I do,” she would say, scared that Ellen would end up neglected or mistreated. She didn’t have to worry, though, because we all wanted to make sure Ellen was well looked after. Today, she lives with Phyllis and me and sometimes goes down to stay for periods of time with Jennie, who moved to North Carolina with her American husband, Paul Hopper, many years ago. Jenny met Paul when he came up to Canning to help the Dafoes get their tobacco farm going back in the early ’50s. They have three grown kids of their own now, and our families have been close, despite the geographical distance between us. I was always fond of Jennie, who is just a few years older than me. When she left school and took a job in Paris, I remember my mother wasn’t too pleased. She thought Jennie should continue her education. I also remember that whenever Jennie got paid, she’d give me a little bit of spending money.
Just one more thing about Ellen: I’ve always said she has a sixth sense about people. I watch how she is with anyone who comes to the door, and her reaction is a bit of a gauge for me of what a person is like. If Ellen is comfortable around someone, if she isn’t afraid and gives them a hug, I feel I can trust that person. But if she shies away or seems wary of them in any way, I take note of that. It’s nature’s protection of her, and for all that she’s mentally disabled, she’s got pretty good “people radar.”
Our family has been blessed with many individuals of exceptional talent, but I think Ellen has taught us compassion and the ability to accept people as they are. We all firmly believe that everyone has something special to contribute, including those with mental and physical challenges. Many people know that Wayne developed a special relationship with a boy who has Down’s syndrome, Joey Moss, when he was playing with the Oilers in Edmonton. Wayne’s also done a lot to raise money over the years, through his tennis and golf tournaments, to help visually challenged kids. As a family, we are all proud to be associated with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) and to help in any way we can. I know Wayne and all my kids got a good part of their caring attitude and sense of responsibility toward more vulnerable people from being around Ellen.
Back in the old days, when I was growing up, we had to look after ourselves, and I think we did a pretty good job. Like I said, we were typical of the families in the area. My parents had some good friends in the community, people like the Kischaks, who had eight children, next door to us. Mrs. Kischak, a widow now in her eighties, still lives there on her own, and I like to drop in to visit with her now and then. Her son Steve, who unfortunately passed away not too long ago, was a good buddy of mine. I’ll never forget, one of our favourite things to do together was run. I don’t mean on a track (that came later), I mean all along the concession roads around our homes. We’d make a game of it, just loping along at full tilt for as long we could. We’d literally run for miles and miles, just a couple of farm boys with nothing better to do than burn off energy. I remember we’d land back at our place and collapse, laughing and laughing. It wasn’t a bad way to amuse yourself, when you think of it. Cost nothing, too.
The river was a big part of our lives. There were rapids, a swimming hole not far down from us and a great big weeping willow tree with a rope attached to it, which the kids used to swing out on and plunge into the river. I nearly drowned myself one time. I can remember hanging there on the rope when I was little, the water eight or nine feet deep below me, and I was hollering and hollering. A guy who was coming to see my older brother, Ed, was standing on the bridge. Next thing I knew, I was on the bank. I must have finally fallen in. From the bridge, that fellow ran all the way down to the swimming hole, which is about a hundred yards away, and pulled me out. I guess kids were always getting into trouble around there. On summer days, whole families and groups of people would have picnics, fish and just relax on the banks. That was a really big deal, seeing everybody there from all the little communities around us.
An even bigger deal would be our occasional car trips to Toronto, to visit with friends of my parents, and with Olga, who had married and moved there with her husband and kids. Today, that trip takes roughly an hour, but back then, it was more like four, one way. Tato was a slow and cautious driver (I’ve been accused of being the same myself). I remember he’d always drive with the headlights on, and when I asked him why, he said this was to alert people that we were coming from a long way away!
I remember some of the parties the adults would have. Lots of food, laughter and music—most of it Eastern European. My dad had an old Russian mandolin he’d play while he sang, and he was an amazing dancer, too. When he got going, in that Cossack style, his legs would fly so fast, honestly, it looked like he was floating above the ground!
We all got involved in music one way or another at school. In fact, Albert and I were not a bad little duo for awhile there, singing in competitions like the Kiwanis Festival. I don’t know where the certificates are now, but I know that when we were about eight or ten (Al’s two years younger than me), we were judged the best duo for our age group in the county. In fact, we ended up in a specially chosen choir of area kids who sang for the king and queen (now the Queen Mother) when they came to visit Canada in the late ’40s. The music teacher, Mr. Ferguson, who came around to all the schools once a month, picked us and a few others to go, and we stood on the platform at the railway station in Woodstock, Ontario, and sang our little hearts out as the royal train passed through. I guess Albert and I never made it to the big time with our act, and it’s too late now, but I’ve always enjoyed singing and still do.
Music was fun, but my biggest thrill was definitely sports. I don’t know where the interest and ability comes from in our family, to tell you the truth. My parents weren’t involved in athletics. I was never a big guy, but I was agile. My brother Al claims that I got out of a few brushes with the leather strap because I could outrun anyone who came at me with one. I guess all those hell-bent runs with Steve Kischak must have paid off.
ALBERT: Walter was an athlete right from public school. Ran like a deer. Just phenomenal … with him, it was speed to burn.
By the time I was in my teens, I was a member of the track and field team at Paris High School. I set a few records in running, long jump and pole vault, and I think some of those records stood for quite awhile too, if I’m not mistaken. I used to make my own poles from trees on our property. I’d just walk into the bush, pick a long, tall tree I thought looked particularly good for the purpose and chop it down. Sounds primitive, but it worked.
Back then, I was athletic, but also a pretty
serious student, keen to get good grades and be involved with as many school activities as possible. There were about four hundred students at my high school, from all around the Paris area, and I think most of us had pretty positive attitudes about doing our best and respecting our teachers. We worked hard, enjoyed what we were doing. We didn’t have anything called a late bus. If you wanted to be involved in after-school activities, you just had to find your way home somehow. Most kids did live way out in the country, but we managed. Someone on the team might have a motorcycle and agree to drop you off. Someone else would borrow the family car, or a parent might pick you up. I remember when I missed the bus, I’d walk from the high school down to Penman’s and get a ride with my dad. And sometimes we’d arrange it so he could pick me up. One day, my dad was going to pick me up at the school around 5:15. I decided to wait for him in the downstairs washroom, where there was a bench I could lie down on. I must have been very tired, because I fell fast asleep. When my dad arrived and I wasn’t outside waiting for him, he went into the school to look for me. He and the janitor finally found me all curled up and out cold on the bench.
The track team was known as the Boys’ Athletic Association, and we were a winning team, provincially. Apart from the track team, if you can believe it, I served on the yearbook committee one year. I actually typed out the entire thing, using the famous one-finger technique. My yearbook nickname was “Manager Gretzky,” and my friends had this to say about me: “Walter is a studious boy, getting extra marks from JC.” (I am sure these were the initials of a teacher, not of the good Lord himself.) It’s true I was manager of the basketball team, even though I didn’t know anything about basketball. Our gym teacher, Gerry Barnhill, said that was okay, I could still do the job. I think I had a spare fifteen minutes in my schedule, so I had to fill it up. Mainly, I used to post the scores from the game on the bulletin board.
ALBERT: Walter’s kind of like Wayne, you know, he had everything. He was smart, he had talent, all the girls were after him because he had all that, and he was a track star. You’d watch, and he’d win the 100-yard dash or the steeplechase, the high jump, pole vault. On and on. Then there was hockey. Was he good? You bet …
While I loved track and excelled at it, I have to admit that my greatest love was hockey. I grew up playing it on the river behind the house. That was the number one sport for us back then. Really, from a pretty early age, I couldn’t get enough of it. Couldn’t wait for the river to freeze over so I could get out on that ice. Coming from a little place like Canning, you really had to teach yourself how to do things and just hope you had some natural talent. Of course, in the beginning, the games were casual, just a bunch of local boys playing around. Al would be goaltender, I’d be forward line. But then when I was about fourteen, I got onto a local team and started playing in arenas around Canning and Paris. Some of them were pretty terrible by today’s standards. The Drumbo arena—a horrific place! There’s never been anything like it, before or since. So cold you might as well have been outside, and it seemed to be built for tiny people—the taller players could hit their heads on the beams! But that’s all you had in those days, and if you wanted to play hockey, you put up with it.
When I was in my later teens, I played Junior B with the Woodstock Warriors. I wasn’t a big guy, maybe five-foot-nine, 140 pounds tops. I can remember playing with my friend Warren MacGregor in the nearby town of Ayr. We were on the same line, and there was a guy on the other team who was twice the size of me. He was the centreman, and every time I came up, he’d give me a jab with his stick or elbow. Warren said to me, “I’ll try to talk to that guy.” He went over, and the guy hauled off and hit Warren before he got a chance to say anything. Warren came staggering back, and I asked, “What did he say?” Warren said, “He wants to talk to you.” I thought that was kind of funny.
Warren used to tease me, saying, “I spend all the time in the corner, and you get all the glory.” You know, he’d get the broken nose, I’d get the goal.
WARREN MACGREGOR: In track and field, Wally was better than a lot of us were, but his forte was hockey. He was a good player. I think it’s inborn, the talent. Some people are just like that, more intense than others. But he was just too tiny, you know. You have to have the desire to develop your talent. He had more than his share of desire. He would play till he was just exhausted. That’s where Wayne gets it from, his dad … Of course, we never envisioned any of this stuff was going to happen back in those days. Nobody had any idea …
We had fun back then, but Warren’s right: I was pretty intense about it, too. I would have liked to play in the NHL, and there were a few people around who thought I might have a chance. I don’t recall the man’s name, but there was a local car salesman who figured that this kid was on his way to the big leagues, and he gave me a ’49 Ford to drive. Actually, it wasn’t a matter of giving it to me, but the purchase agreement on it was something like a dollar down, a dollar a week. I was seventeen, and a car was a pretty coveted thing. My brother Al borrowed it once, and only recently confessed he was responsible for scratching it. I let him take it out to impress his girlfriend, Marilyn—who later became (and still is) his wife—and he decided to give her a driving lesson. They were on a gravel road, a country road, and she put that car in the ditch. I didn’t spot the scratch until two days later. I asked about the mark on the side of the car: “Where the hell did it come from?” Nobody confessed. Forty-five years later, Albert finally told me, and I’ve forgiven him. And Marilyn.
That car would soon be replaced by my beloved old Blue Goose anyway, but I’ll tell that story later.
I kept my NHL dreams alive throughout my teens, and eventually I did go up to Toronto and try out for the Marlies, in the Junior A league. That must have been in ’54 or ’55. But I was out of luck. A couple of weeks before the trials, I got chicken pox. I was really sick, lost a lot of weight, and, as Warren said, I wasn’t big to begin with. That ended up being the problem. I scored as many goals as the others did in the exhibition game, but I just wasn’t big enough. I went back to playing with Woodstock.
Albert says I was good at everything, but I really had to work at school to do well. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life besides sports. When I first graduated from high school, I continued to live at the farm through the summer and into the fall, picking tobacco in the neighbours’ fields, which was really back-breaking work. When that was all done for the season, I was out of a job and didn’t really have any idea of what I was going to do. Walking down the street in Paris one day, it must have been late September or October, I ran into Warren. When he heard I was looking for work, he told me I should apply at Bell Canada in Brantford, where he was working on the construction crew. That’s exactly what I did. It was the beginning of a thirty-four-year career with Bell, for both Warren and me, and, as a matter of fact, the two of us maintained our friendship and retired on exactly the same day, back in 1991.
Once again, I have to comment on how different life was back then. I remember that around the time I started working for Bell, I was about eighteen and my mother asked me, “Walter, do you smoke?” At the time, I didn’t, and so I said no. It sounds hard to believe, in light of what we know about how harmful and addictive smoking is, but she said to me, “All men smoke, you should take it up.” So I did! And I was a chain-smoker right up until I had the stroke in 1991. That, and only that, was what stopped me. The surgeon who operated on me told my family that the smoking was definitely a factor in what had happened to me. And though I never did smoke again, I can tell you that I wanted to for a long time. Even during the time after the stroke that I hardly remember, the habit was so ingrained that I used to pat my pockets looking for my pack of smokes, and I’d ask for a cigarette from others whenever I had the chance. That went on for quite some time.
But way back when, my tobacco habit just made me one of the crowd, a grown-up and, according to my mother, a real man! Because I was a hyper kind of person anyway, it was easy enou
gh for me to become a heavy smoker, just to use up some of that nervous energy, though of course it didn’t really help. It was, in fact, terribly unhealthy.
It amazes me when Albert says I was popular with the girls—I really can’t remember that!
I do remember meeting one particular girl, named Phyllis, at a wiener roast on the farm, which was attended by a bunch of kids from the area. She was fifteen at the time and I was eighteen. What can I say? I took one look and knew she was the one for me. I guess she felt the same way, because eventually she said yes. We got married three years after that—and forty-one years later, we’re still together.
Phyllis was a very attractive, strong-willed and popular girl. Her little sister Sandi tells me now that Phyllis used to sneak out of the house after the lights were out. I swear, it was never because of me. Actually, she came to the wiener roast where we met with another boy, but I didn’t let that stop me.
Phyllis was born and raised in Paris. She comes from good British stock, from down in Queenston Heights near Niagara Falls, and is a descendant of General Brock. At first her father wasn’t too happy to find out she was planning to marry someone who didn’t share their heritage. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t cause us some friction in the beginning, but eventually we sorted it out and I was fully accepted into the family. Again, those were such different times.
Really, we were just typical small-town kids in the ’50s: pretty certain we’d find a match in our crowd, get married and start having kids without delay. In the meantime, we amused ourselves one way or another, often driving places and hanging around in a group. Drive-in movies were all the rage then, and we’d go to lots of them in my car. And then there was the Calico Kitchen, the biggest teen hangout for miles around. It was one of those places where you ordered your food through a speaker and ate it in your car. The parking lot was gigantic. It’s where you went on a Saturday night to show off your car and your girl. It was definitely the place to be seen, and it had the world’s greatest foot-long hot dogs.
On Family, Hockey and Healing Page 3